Here’s a followup from the reader who served up yesterday’s chart on the varying numbers of animals killed for the same calorie count:

Regarding your reader’s reply in the update, the chart was in response to the crazy notion that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals. What do some people think we feed to the animals in the torture factories? Rocks? Furthermore, the notion that chicken suffering is to be discounted seems quite wrong to me. I agree that pigs are among the most intelligent and sentient beings abused for their flesh. But chickens are right up there with them. From “The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken” in Scientific American, outlined here:

“It is now clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates…” — Dr. Lesley Rogers

“Chickens do not just live in the present but can anticipate the future and demonstrate self-control…something previously attributed only to humans and other primates…” — Discovery Magazine

“Chickens are . . . complex behaviorally, do quite well in learning, show a rich social organization, and have a diverse repertoire of calls. Anyone who has kept barnyard chickens also recognizes their significant differences in personality.” – Dr. Bernard Rollin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University

Further, because chickens are so small compared to cows and other mammals that humans eat, we must abuse far more of them per pound of flesh. And the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which isn’t very humane, doesn’t apply to non-mammals such as chickens.

If one wants to eat animal products with a smaller cruelty footprint, then the red meats are the way to go. Yes, they have a larger environmental impact, especially the least cruel types. That is not a reason to eat chickens but a reason to eat red meats infrequently and in small quantities, and to otherwise eat plants. Humans do not need to eat animal products, but if one chooses to do so anyway, the best easy approach is to eat beef, lamb, and other red meats in limited quantities (add oysters and mussels if one wishes to). But even starting out with something as easy as Meat-Free Mondays makes a very significant difference; most people should try it.

The more we learn about how animal products are produced, the clearer it is that bird and pig products should be avoided.

In further response to those concerns, and in response to the reader who worried about hurting plants (although they have no brains), I must point out that eating animal products means we have to grow vastly more crops, and kill vastly more mice and plants in doing so.

Animal agriculture is a food factory in reverse. If we grew crops to feed to people directly instead of to animals, we would only have to grow one-tenth to one-half as many. Half to 90 percent of the calories, protein, and other food value in plants disappears in the process of feeding them to animals and then eating those animals or their bodily excretions. This, and human overpopulation, are why our food system is completely dependent upon fossil-fuel based fertilizer, which is destroying the environment.

In further response to the hurting plants non-issue, I must point out that many plants are annuals and die at the end of the season. Others drop fruits, nuts, and seeds, so animals can pick them up and spread the seeds around as they eat them. Sorry, but if someone cares about the suffering of other sentient beings or the environment, reducing the quantity of animal products in one’s diet, or eliminating them, is an enormous positive. We should all do our part, such as participating in Meat-Free Mondays or some other such beneficial program.

If you have anything to add, drop us an email. Update from a reader who usually comments under “Blue Fish”:

The graphic shown for this note seems to imply that—on the basis of animals killed per calorie, which seems to be conflated with the amount of animal suffering—chicken is the least ethical meat, followed by beef and then pork. This is flawed reasoning for anyone who does not conceive of animal suffering as tied to the numeric quantity of animals killed. Most people understand intuitively, if not in a formal sense, that the degree of concern we extend towards animals’ suffering is proportional to a quality that they have, which is more or less intelligence. Stepping on ants doesn’t bother (most of) us; clubbing baby seals does.

A lot of this is irrational bias due to some creatures bearing sufficient physiological similarity to humans to activate protective paternal and maternal instincts. The features of a kitten’s face are as recognizable to us as those of an infant and we are consequently disinclined to harm it. Regardless, if minimizing suffering is the goal, then it should be recognized that different creatures have different capacities for suffering, and that this capacity seems to be tied to the quality of intelligence.

I am a loosey-goosey “grey” vegetarian; I avoid beef most, then pork, permit fowl regularly and eat fish, shellfish and game with no compunctions. This is because I sloppily synthesize concern for animal suffering, which is tertiary to me, with environmental concerns, from which perspective beef is the worst meat. The status of workers in the American meat industry is also a big disincentive to consume factory-farmed meat and is similarly of greater importance to me than animal suffering.

Coming back around to the main point, this is why the notion that chicken is the least ethical meat is a difficult proposition. If your metric is suffering, you should put the most gregarious and intelligent factory-farmed animal, the pig, at the top. If the metric is environmental impact, then the enemy is beef. Only if you think one death creates one unit of animal suffering can you arrive at this conclusion, and that is an odd perspective.

First, let me make quite clear that I am a farmer, an organic farmer, and an omnivore. I have no problem whatsoever with vegan diets, vegetarians, or any other dietary choices. We all have different bodies and different nutritional needs, as a growing body of scientific research is discovering.

However, I do take issue with vegan and vegetarian claims of less bloodshed. This is disingenuous and quite naive. Do you know what organic farmers use instead of chemical fertilizers? They use blood meal. BLOOD meal. Or feather meal. Yup, real feathers ground up, and those feathers were not graciously donated by a flock of generous fowl living in bird paradise on earth.

If we go back a hundred years, all farmers kept livestock—not just for milk and meat, but to provide an integrated and natural source of fertilizer for their farms. Today, we have specialized agribusiness to the point where farmers may have 1000 acres of corn or a 1000 head of cattle, but almost never both. Historically, you could run a small family farm and lovingly care for a few cows or goats who produced milk, constant fertilizers, and meat when they grew old.

This cycle is terribly broken. And we all suffer, including vegans in their attempts to remove cruelty from their diets.

Modern Farmer has discussed the sometimes-creepy use of blood meal to feed plants and animals. As for the larger ethical question of eating vegan, does intent matter? This reader thinks so:

The difference between insects and small animals like mice being killed to produce vegetables, soy, or any non-animal food and killing cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other living beings for food is that in the former scenario, the carnage is an unfortunate consequence; in the later scenario, the carnage is the point. I think as an issue of ethics, the question of intent is the key point to focus on.

Ethics aside, the same reader believes we should discuss the bigger questions in food production:

In the year 2016, we have to evolve our diets in a way that addresses the immorality of factory farming. (We could be factory farming dogs and horses, but we don’t: Why? Because of habit? Not good enough). We have to evolve our diets in a way that addresses the reality of the environmental effects of meat and dairy production. And finally, we have to evolve our diets in a way that addresses the preventable diseases caused by the over-consumption of meat and dairy foods (and its effects on our healthcare system).

All non-carnivores can’t be perfect, one reader argues:

I’m no longer a strict vegan—but I was—and have been a vegetarian for well over two-thirds of my life. And I’m very much not a “militant vegetarian.” I don’t spout my views left and right or refuse to dine with people who eat meat—such behavior generally falls on deaf ears. I’m equally (or more likely) to attack “vegetarian” friends who order a meat dish, pick out the meat, and throw it in the trash—while saying that they wouldn’t kill any animal if necessary for their own survival, all while walking off self-righteously in leather boots. That’s complete BS.

We do what we can in this world, but if there is a cockroach head, leg, or thorax in my peanut butter, my response does not have to be to have (eat) a cow about it. Or to throw in the towel all together. That’s insane. Nothing in life is perfect.

This reader questions the motives behind the ethical critique:

When non-vegans start expressing concern for all the mice and bugs vegans kill, I begin to question their sincerity. My impression is that they don’t actually care about the mice; they just want to remind me that I’m not better than them.

Another reader is curious: What about the plants?

Why is it okay to kill vegetable life and not animal life? It’s all life. Just because some organisms have a central nervous system like us doesn’t mean the other forms of life don’t suffer or feel pain in their own way. It seems like an incredibly self-centered belief, one that creates a hierarchy of life that places things that look like us (or have evolutionary development we subjectively recognize as similar to our own) above things that look less like us.

Of course, the incredible rush of endorphins one feels from broadcasting his or her righteousness is more than enough to make up for the lack of meat in a diet.

James Hamblin sat down with Def Jam founder Russell Simmons to swap strategies to defend vegan diets from common counter-arguments (e.g. “I can’t give up meat, because meat is delicious.”):

Among the counter-arguments they didn’t discuss: That a vegan diet may not be entirely bloodless. One reader summarizes this somewhat-disturbing take below. (Warning: You might not want to read this while eating.)

There is no such thing as a vegan. Every piece of food you eat is crawling with little animals. Your stomach is currently slaughtering millions of worms and other critters. Furthermore, to get your soy, they killed thousands of mice and other ground dwelling animals. Not to mention the insects.

Mmmm, dead mice in your soy—delicious. So how accurate is the argument? Scientific American’s Kyle Hill covered the bugs we accidentally digest each year:

Try as we might with insecticides and other engineered poisons, bugs crawl all over our food to feed (and procreate) on it. When we harvest and package our crops, a lot of bugs come along for the ride. Be aware, all the hitchhikers aren’t removed. At least there are limits on how many bugs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lets you unknowingly eat.

Staples like broccoli, canned tomatoes, and hops readily contain “insect fragments”–heads, thoraxes, and legs–and even whole insects. (I won’t tell you about the rat hair limits…) Fig paste can harbor up to 13 insect heads in 100 grams; canned fruit juices can contain a maggot for every 250 milliliters; 10 grams of hops can be the home for 2,500 aphids [...]

The “action levels” set by the FDA are for maximum insect contamination, so you ultimately ingest less than these limits. Nevertheless, bugs are making it into your gut whether you see them or not. Layla Eplett over at the Scientific American Guest Blog estimates that “an individual probably ingests about one to two pounds of flies, maggots and other bugs each year without even knowing it.”

But what about mice? ABC reported on research by an Oregon State University professor named Steven Davis that claims several types of small critters are killed during the farming process:

Nobody’s hands are free from the blood of other animals, not even vegetarians, he concluded. Millions of animals are killed every year, Davis says, to prepare land for growing crops, “like corn, soybean, wheat and barley, the staples of a vegan diet.” … The animals in this case are mice and moles and rabbits and other creatures that are run over by tractors, or lose their habitat to make way for farming, so they are not as “visible” as cattle, he says.

And that, Davis says, gives rise to a fundamental question: “What is it that makes it OK to kill animals of the field so that we can eat [vegetables or fruits] but not pigs or chickens or cows?”

A post on The Flaming Vegan disputes Davis’s research. An Atlantic reader takes a lesser-of-two-evils approach to veganism:

Being vegan isn’t perfect, but it’s more about doing your best to cause the least amount of damage. Humans cause damage with anything they do, even walking. It’s unavoidable, but you can minimize it.

Have thoughts on the philosophical underpinnings of a vegan lifestyle? Let us know.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.